Our existence is our perception. Who we are, ultimately, is defined by how we choose to process the world: what we pay attention to, in particular. I don’t believe in “will”, per se. What there is is focus. You can be said to have “will”–and manifestly many people do–when you focus on one course of action, and are able to discard all other courses of action, as for example quitting.
I wonder, though, about everyday perception. When you are with your lover, is that different than when you are standing next to the coffeepot, talking about the last American Idol? If you an ambulance driver, is your experience picking up victims of fatal car crashes necessarily different than the experience of a clerk processing, say, accident claims?
If we posit that the brain is some sort of wondrous machine (it is, clearly: the open question is in how much more “Mind” may consist, if anything), then all emotions are open to you all the time. They are just neurochemical transactions.
On the level of pure awareness, can it not be that jaded ambulance drivers lose any qualitative reaction to dead bodies? Can it not be that some clerks find filing exciting? Why is that impossible, other than that most people resent it?
I’m listening to Enigma’s 1990 (if my Roman numeral translation is right) cd. Tape, actually. I’m always a bit behind the times. This RECORD–can I say that?–has long seemed to me to stand well for what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism, and even Cultural Sadeism. They start with monastic hymns, which are rendered quickly ironic by modernistic beats, and hedonistic (onanistic, as Bloom would likely view it) beats, which quickly explicitly acknowledge Sade, as the Godfather of the loss of self restraint. Then you get the end of the world, then a desire to return to belief.
Anyway, that is what got me thinking about qualitative gestalts/paradigms. They tried to create something DIFFERENT than what everyone else was making. Not just new lyrics, or rhthyms, but a blending of mythic themes, with modernism. Of the sacred, with confusion.
And I heard something like that on the radio yesterday, while traveling. They included the gongs of a church, an Islamic muezzin, and several other types of music from around the world, with what were actually very banal lyrics, repeated over and over. Something like “love is deeper than death; jealousy comes from the grave”. Not quite right, but close. It felt like poetry, but it wasn’t. It was a riff.
How do we return to the “rivers of belief”? These musicians seem to sense a loss, while they are speeding it along.
Life is interesting. I never get bored with the irony in which we bathe daily.
I should add I’ve answered that question often, so I’ll leave it be for now.